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The paragraph about him meeting Kurosawa and receiving a "samurai sword" is unsourced, so I should just cut the whole paragraph. But "samurai sword" is especially problematic because it's almost certainly inaccurate. Popular western media -- including possibly Sturges himself in interviews -- refer to any single-edged, curved Japanese blade as a "samurai sword" even though probably the vast majority of such swords had no connection whatsoever to the " samurai". The idea that Kurosawa -- himself a descendant of samurai -- would hand over a priceless family heirloom to a fellow director who made a film he liked is unbelievable almost to the point of absurdity, so if he gave him any such item it was probably a sword he purchased for the occasion -- no doubt at great expense, but still not the same as sacrificing his family's heritage to someone who just happened to make a good movie. Finding sources for "samurai sword" is not hard, but finding sources that meet the requirement of WP:EXTRAORDINARY would be pretty damn hard. Given that what almost certainly happened was that Kurosawa presented Sturges with a common, purchasable Japanese sword rather than something that could be accurately called a "samurai sword", what would be great is if we could find a source that actually specified this fact rather than parroting the same, inaccurate phrase "samurai sword". Likely, if this originates in an interview with Sturges, he himself used that phrase and it has just been repeated throughout various media with no fact-checking on what exactly was meant by "samurai sword".
It would violate WP:NOR for me to alter "samurai sword" to read "Japanese sword" in the article on this basis, but it violates WP:EXTRAORDINARY to say Kurosawa presented Sturges with an authentic "samurai sword".
And it violates WP:SLANG to claim that WP:UE and WP:COMMONNAME allow us to use the phrase "samurai sword" even though it is inaccurate and gives the (almost certainly false) impression that Kurosawa, a man of buke stock himself, presented an authentic samurai sword to Sturges.
So the best course of action now is to remove the clause until a reliable source can be located that allows us to include it in its proper context. (Perhaps the original "Sturges interview" I am hypothesizing exists, and stating something like Sturges claimed in an interview that Kurosawa had presented him with a "samurai sword", and that this had been one of the proudest moments of his career.)
Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 17:39, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
Kurosawa himself was somewhat ambiguous in his opinion of the film. In 1980 he was quoted in People magazine as saying that 'Gunmen are not samurai'. While not an endorsement, neither is this statement a condemnation of Sturges' film. Studio publicity claims that Kurosawa had sent a katana sword to Sturges shortly after the film's release, expressing his appreciation of the film. There are reasons to doubt this story: the same publicists also claim that Seven Samurai won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1955, even though it didn't; the award went to Samurai, aka Miyamoto Musashi (though Seven Samurai was nominated in the following year's awards - for Art Direction and Costume Design), and years later executive producer Walter Mirisch recalled that the gift was a Kabuki doll."
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
John Sturges article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
The paragraph about him meeting Kurosawa and receiving a "samurai sword" is unsourced, so I should just cut the whole paragraph. But "samurai sword" is especially problematic because it's almost certainly inaccurate. Popular western media -- including possibly Sturges himself in interviews -- refer to any single-edged, curved Japanese blade as a "samurai sword" even though probably the vast majority of such swords had no connection whatsoever to the " samurai". The idea that Kurosawa -- himself a descendant of samurai -- would hand over a priceless family heirloom to a fellow director who made a film he liked is unbelievable almost to the point of absurdity, so if he gave him any such item it was probably a sword he purchased for the occasion -- no doubt at great expense, but still not the same as sacrificing his family's heritage to someone who just happened to make a good movie. Finding sources for "samurai sword" is not hard, but finding sources that meet the requirement of WP:EXTRAORDINARY would be pretty damn hard. Given that what almost certainly happened was that Kurosawa presented Sturges with a common, purchasable Japanese sword rather than something that could be accurately called a "samurai sword", what would be great is if we could find a source that actually specified this fact rather than parroting the same, inaccurate phrase "samurai sword". Likely, if this originates in an interview with Sturges, he himself used that phrase and it has just been repeated throughout various media with no fact-checking on what exactly was meant by "samurai sword".
It would violate WP:NOR for me to alter "samurai sword" to read "Japanese sword" in the article on this basis, but it violates WP:EXTRAORDINARY to say Kurosawa presented Sturges with an authentic "samurai sword".
And it violates WP:SLANG to claim that WP:UE and WP:COMMONNAME allow us to use the phrase "samurai sword" even though it is inaccurate and gives the (almost certainly false) impression that Kurosawa, a man of buke stock himself, presented an authentic samurai sword to Sturges.
So the best course of action now is to remove the clause until a reliable source can be located that allows us to include it in its proper context. (Perhaps the original "Sturges interview" I am hypothesizing exists, and stating something like Sturges claimed in an interview that Kurosawa had presented him with a "samurai sword", and that this had been one of the proudest moments of his career.)
Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 17:39, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
Kurosawa himself was somewhat ambiguous in his opinion of the film. In 1980 he was quoted in People magazine as saying that 'Gunmen are not samurai'. While not an endorsement, neither is this statement a condemnation of Sturges' film. Studio publicity claims that Kurosawa had sent a katana sword to Sturges shortly after the film's release, expressing his appreciation of the film. There are reasons to doubt this story: the same publicists also claim that Seven Samurai won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1955, even though it didn't; the award went to Samurai, aka Miyamoto Musashi (though Seven Samurai was nominated in the following year's awards - for Art Direction and Costume Design), and years later executive producer Walter Mirisch recalled that the gift was a Kabuki doll."